With exam season drawing to a close, and things still a long way from returning to any semblance of normality, most of us have plenty of free time on our hands. Regardless of how good the weather is, and how much exercise we plan to do, many of us will find ourselves behind our screens a lot. And why not? Relaxation is important too.
Variety is the spice of life and that’s no different now. With this in mind, The University Times asked four film studies lecturers for some lockdown recommendations. Together these suggestions compose a diverse list – it’s sure to have something for everyone.
Prof Ruth Barton
After a day of Zoom meetings all run off an unpredictable hotspot, the last thing I feel like come evening time is turning on the telly. And if I do, it has to be very good. My pre-existing low tolerance of cheap programming and reality TV has been amplified under the crisis. I really do not want to watch a season of A Day in the Life of a Rural Post Office or Z-list celebrities taking their kit off in some faraway jungle. Reality is too weird these days for ordinary kind of rubbish.
It was of course the Guardian that tipped me off to Babylon Berlin. Guided by its unerring feel for my predictably middle-class taste, it pointed out that season three of this undervalued German TV series was on its way to our screens. Since then, our household has been working its way slowly through season one. Slowly, because this kind of luxury viewing has to be rationed. Babylon Berlin (available on various streaming channels and for purchase) is a sumptuous thriller set in 1920s Berlin, the brainchild of Tom Twyker (Run, Lola, Run), and based on the novels by Volker Kutscher.
In season one, the McGuffin is that detective Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) has been sent from Cologne to Berlin to locate a pornographic film that could implicate the mayor. The Berlin in which he finds himself is on the verge of communist revolt, with faction fighting between the Soviets and Trotskyites; where agitators confront the police, themselves enmired in corruption, while ordinary citizens, many in terrible poverty following defeat in World War I, scrape by in the only ways they can, and at the cabaret all manner of licentious behaviour is fragrantly celebrated. Amid all this, flapper and aspirant police detective, Lotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries) declares sleep a waste of precious time and strives to spend every hour of her day exploring the possibilities that her city has to offer. Shot with all the production values of quality filmmaking, Babylon Berlin boasts a labyrinthine storyline and extraordinary performances. I can’t recommend it more highly.
Dr Jennifer O’Meara
My recommendations offer quite different ways that films can help us connect with life under COVID-19, ranging from the physical isolation and the links between physical and mental health in Safe (1995), to early explorations of our virtual selves in The Electronic Diaries (1984), or more abstract and therapeutic uses of screen media in The Text of Light (1974).
If you’re looking for a thematically relevant film then Safe provides an unnerving mix of similarities to, and differences from, the current pandemic. Focused on Carol (Julianne Moore), a suburban housewife who develops inexplicable symptoms and is diagnosed with “multiple chemical sensitivity”, Todd Haynes’s atmospheric film has been considered as a commentary on 1980s America, where fear and uncertainty surrounding AIDS co-existed with the kind of new age medicine treatments that Carol seeks out in an effort to cure her allergy “to the 20th century”. In an effort to heal herself, Carol increasingly self-isolates. More generally, her road to diagnosis (which includes doctors’ assumptions that the illness is all in her head) gets at current anxieties; where people are unsure if bodily changes are serious symptoms of coronavirus or, say, seasonal allergies.
As I’ve written about recently for the Irish Times, we’re currently very reliant on screens, including attempts to live most of our working and social lives through them. This means that sitting down to focus on a feature-length narrative film is not necessarily what we need or want right now. Instead, I’m inclined to watch something like Stan Brakhage’s The Text of Light, which offers a more abstract and visually calming experience. A pioneer in US experimental cinema, Brakhage’s film consists entirely of a time-lapse of books, paintings and textures, all shot through a thick glass ashtray. A digital version of the 16mm film is available via Ubu.com, with the extra abstraction of light and colour making this ripped copy even more sensuous.
Tasked with presenting virtual versions of ourselves to the world, it’s worth looking to The Electronic Diaries Part 1 (1984), experimental artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson’s early video diaries. Long before YouTube vloggers and social media, Hershman Leeson chronicled her life history in a collection of intimate and often provocative diaries.
Dr Marissa Aroy
Documentary The Wolfpack (2015) follows the six Argulo brothers who lived their entire young lives imprisoned by their father in a New York City apartment. Their only connection to the outside world was movies, and they meticulously re-created and re-enacted their favorite films, from The Dark Knight to Reservoir Dogs. It’s a surprisingly moving film about a family in a different sort of lockdown and the imagination and creativity they used to live within their favorite movies and escape their prison.
A different type of wolfpack comes in the form of The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio’s over-the-top biopic of one man’s insatiable need for power, money, drugs and sex. As entertaining as the film is, the excess makes my teeth ache, and under pandemic lockdown, where our most excessive consumption is purchasing toilet paper, the greed and wantonness makes me glad to be living a simpler life.
In Groundhog Day (1993), Bill Murray as acerbic and cynical TV weatherman Phil Connors ends up finding redemption in the repetition of one day lived over and over again. As we shelter in place, with many fraught days melding into a mildly baffling sameness, there’s a hope that we too can find redemption in the day-to-day, the extraordinary in the ordinary.
And speaking of extraordinary, the last recommendation is Extra Ordinary (2019), a homegrown Irish comedy lightly sprinkled with silly horror. Maeve Higgins plays Rose, a woman with the unusual talent of ghost whispering. She partners with the sweet yet clueless Martin (Barry Ward) to save his daughter from a spell wrought by hasbin rockstar Christian Winter (Will Forté). Rose and Martin’s adventures around town remind me of the neighbors I haven’t seen in months: the eccentric, the unbearable, the kind and the wonderful. Can’t wait to have a cup of tea with any of them again.
Dr Justin Mac Gregor
Sitting at home, bored? Here are a few can’t miss films you probably have never heard of, so some are hard to find, but all are worth your time.
With Hamlet 2 (2008), a sequel to Hamlet starring Steve Coogan as a teacher who does not understand why everyone had to die in Hamlet. He wants to give Hamlet a second chance so writes a school play where Jesus brings Hamlet a time machine and … you know, best to just watch it. Hilarious, moving. Elisabeth Shue steals the show as Elisabeth Shue. Oh yeah, it’s a musical at the end.
I still remember trying to get my friends in College to go and see Swimming to Cambodia (1987) with me. “What’s it about?”, said Bruce H. “It’s a guy sitting at a desk telling a story.” Pause. “Does he get up?”, asked Bruce H. “No”, I replied, “but there’s a map and he has a pointed stick”. Ignore the premise. Jonathan Demme directs Spalding Gray’s off-broadway masterpiece. Afterwards, you’ll swear he showed you what he was talking about. A journey for the imagination. And it’s funny.
In In A World… (2013), Lake Bell writes and directs a film with herself as an aspiring voice over actor whose father is one of the giants of the industry. There are some sublime bits of comedy in the film but it turns at the end and I dare you not to cry. Most screenplays are heavy-handed and point to tidy conclusions. This one looks like a mess but it is brilliantly subtle and sets you up beautifully.
Canada’s Michael Dowse explores two beer-swilling small-town losers in FUBAR (2002). The film has a nice Kevin Smith thing going until one of the buddies gets sick. And then it becomes something else: an examination of the love that underlies friendship and which sees people through the most difficult times and turns teenagers into adults.
As long as we’re talking about Michael Dowse … It’s All Gone Pete Tong (2004) is the best Canadian film ever made. Now, most of you don’t know Canadian film – Lynne Stopkewich? Mina Shum? Bruce Sweeney? Bruce Macdonald? They are all great, but this film has a freedom rarely seen in films of the Great White North. Paul Kaye plays a DJ who goes deaf. And then finds music. Run to see this one.
Watch these film and then we can talk about Muriel’s Wedding, Hard Core Logo and other films everyone should still know
Reporting by Stephen Patrick Murray.
